John Lucas

I work with words.

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Vancouver-based writer and editor driven by a passion for telling a good story and inspiring others.

  • An old song for a new year

    Greetings! I haven’t been around here much lately, which is what happens when you decide to prioritize doing things that make you money over things that don’t, like blogging. To start the year off, here’s a remix I recently did of a song that my old band Hinterland first released in 2003. This is that rarest of remixes that’s actually shorter than the original track. And contrary to what I just said, this remix is making me exactly zero dollars. But sometimes you’ve got to do a thing just for the love of it, right?

    Here’s the original, for the sake of comparison:

  • A brief update

    Hey everybody. I haven’t posted anything here in a while, but I have a good excuse. I have been on leave from the Straight since September, and I haven’t been doing any writing. I’ll be back soon, and I have some other stuff on the horizon as well. Stay tuned.

  • A new addition: Multimedia

    So, I added a new page called Multimedia in order to highlight my forays into audio-visual production and editing, photography, and possibly other stuff. Click the link above. Or, hell, just click here.

  • Like me on Facebook

    I’m on Facebook now. I mean, I have been on Facebook for years, but only on a private, personal page. I now have a public page for my professional activities. You can like it. Or not. It’s entirely up to you.

  • Focus, focus, focus

    waterpail

    I’m terminally stressed out, and it’s all my fault.

    I’m guilty of spreading myself too thin. Too much going on in my head and not enough time to make most of it reality. Everyone is busy, I understand that. I’m no different from anyone in that regard. I’m not a special snowflake, except for in the same way that each of us is a special snowflake. But I’m not talking about the usual challenges of juggling a full-time job with parenting and dealing with things like unexpected and very expensive home-reno projects (hello, City of Vancouver!), flat tires, terminally ill pets, and everything else that makes modern life stressful.

    I’m talking about the added pressure I put on myself, which is largely voluntary. You see, I was unlucky enough to have been born a creative person, or at least a person with a drive to be creative. (I make no great claims about the quality of my output.) Maybe unlucky is too strong a word. The real problem is one of focus.

    If my creative energy is a finite reservoir of water, and each of my creative outlets is an empty pail… well, you see where I’m going with this. The more pails I try to fill, the less water each pail gets. In other words, in trying to do many things, I am inevitably doing a bunch of them in a half-assed way. And I really should be putting my whole ass in, amirite?

    What’s on my plate?

    • Playing in a couple of different bands. I did this for several years in the 2000s, too, and I managed to record albums and do some touring with two bands I was in simultaneously. But back then I wasn’t a dad, and I guess I was a lot more driven to do music and succeed at some sort of indie-rock level. And I had enough free time to rehearse three nights a week, every week.
    • Making my own music. I have this little electronic-music thing that I putter away at occasionally. Actually, if I were to count how many months it has been since I even opened any of the Pro Tools sessions, I would probably get depressed.
    • Blogging. Well, I’m doing it right now, instead of doing anything else, right? I also have this blog, which hasn’t been updated since June. And I just started a Tumblr page about 20th century B.C. art. I can get away with being lazy with that one, because it’s mostly visual, but of course I feel driven to create original content for it. I’m also trying to learn HTML and various other design things. Fun!
    • Writing. Various unfinished (and in some cases, un-started) screenplays and novels. I can’t really write fiction. But some part of me keeps telling me I should try. I should find that part of myself and murder the little bastard in its sleep. (Hey, that was fiction!)
    • Photography. I don’t devote much time to this (because I don’t have any), and most of my photos are of my son and the nature walks we take. But I would like to improve my skills, because it’s a fun and fulfilling hobby. I can spend hours in Photoshop. But I probably shouldn’t.

    There’s more, but I’m sure you get the point. Someone recommended a book to me recently: Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky. I haven’t read it yet, but here’s what was conveyed to me: if you want to do something well, you need to focus your energy on that one thing. I can’t do only one thing. But I can do fewer things all at the same time. If that means saying no to things my creatively driven self wants to say yes to, so be it. What will I focus on, and what will be consigned to the back burner? I don’t know yet. But if this is the last time I post to this blog this year, you’ll know why.

  • 20BC: Follow Me on Tumblr

    SFU by Arthur Erickson

    So, I started a Tumblr blog. Or Tumblr page. Or “a Tumblr”. Whatever you want to call it. I was inspired to make its focus on B.C. art, design, and architecture of the 20th century. Or at least the stuff I like. (The emphasis will probably be on the second half of that century, but there might be exceptions.) If that interests you, feel free to follow me at 20bc.tumblr.com. I promise to update it more often than I update this blog (which isn’t saying much, I realize).

    To get the ball rolling, I reblogged some photos of the Simon Fraser University Burnaby campus, designed by Arthur Erickson for Erickson-Massey Architects.

    Giving credit where it’s due, I am using the Expo 86 logo as an avatar. That was designed by Frank Mayrs and Ian MacLeod.

  • The Georgia Straight’s Best of Vancouver 2014

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    This week the Georgia Straight celebrates some of the coolest things in the city with its annual Best of Vancouver issue. I have some content in there, including an item on Vancouver’s most disgustingly beautiful piece of public art. (Can you guess which one I mean?)

    As part of the Best of Bands feature, I shine the spotlight on local acts Tough Age and Young Liars. Huge thanks to everyone who made this feature possible, including all the writers and bands, and especially Straight music editor Mike Usinger and photographers Rebecca Blissett and Emily Cooper. Stellar work, everyone.

  • Orijit Sen

    Orijit-Sens-mural
    For last week’s Georgia Straight, I interview Indian graphic artist and comics creator Orijit Sen. We talked about his massive mural in the Punjab, a scaled-down version of which he has brought to Vancouver for the Indian Summer festival. We also discussed his first graphic novel, River of Stories, published in 1994.

    Like the fictional journalist at the centre of River of Stories, Sen found himself drawn to the antidevelopment side as he learned more about what was at stake. “Although I tried to give a sense of the arguments the movement was trying to put forward in a kind of rational sense,” he says, “in fact the main character goes from being this person who doesn’t know too much about it, who’s going in as a journalist to report, and who becomes a fervent supporter of it. So it’s the same journey that happened to me personally as well.”

    Thanks to some friends involved with an environmental NGO, Sen was the recipient of a grant that allowed him to publish River of Stories. In a delicious bit of poetic justice, the money came from the same government that he was now actively protesting against. “But you know how sometimes the government is: the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” he says, clearly relishing the irony. “They were supposedly giving money to this NGO to produce environmental literature for young people—so, basically, stuff about trees, plants—obviously assuming that it’s all politically safe stuff.”

    Read the full article here.

    You can read River of Stories in its entirety here.

    If you happen to be in Vancouver, Orijit Sen will be part of a panel discussion called Artpolitik at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts this evening (July 9) at 6 p.m. At 4 p.m., he’ll give a free talk on the scaled-down version of his Punjab mural in the Woodward’s Atrium, where the piece is on display until July 13. See the Indian Summer Festival website for details.

  • Tame Impala

    leaves

    Just revisiting another of the stories I wrote for Concrete Skateboarding. Click here to read my article about Australian psych-rock wizard Kevin Parker and his musical project Tame Impala.

    Impressively, Lonerism certainly sounds like the product of a group of people. It’s all Parker, though, and while the Fab Four vocal harmonies and acid-washed guitar licks of songs like “Mind Mischief” and “Apocalypse Dreams” suggest he hasn’t lost his taste for paisley-skies psychedelia, there are plenty of elements that set this LP apart from its predecessor. Foremost among these is Parker’s ample use of keyboards, adding layers of pastel-wash synth tones to tracks like “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” and “She Just Won’t Believe Me”.

    “I was just feeling like looking to other things to get new crazy sounds,” he explains. “I’m always trying to find the craziest sound, you know—the thing that sounds the least like it comes from Earth. It’s really difficult to do that with guitars, because whatever you do with a guitar, it’s usually going to end up sounding like a guitar. It’s going to have that kind of earthy, rock ’n’ roll feel. But with synthesizers, they just start in a completely different place. It was just really kind of exciting to have this whole new playing field of sounds and emotions.”

  • Chelsea Wolfe

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    For this week’s Georgia Straight, I interviewed Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe about her most recent album, Pain Is Beauty, and her film project, “Lone”. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

    “A lot of the album was inspired by natural disasters, and the way we think we have our lives under control, but in a second the forces of nature could take that all away from us,” Wolfe explains. “I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s reality for a lot of people in the world. Things like that happen every day. I definitely think that those two things were indicative of wanting to be able to move forward but having to overcome things that come into your life unexpectedly.”

    Read the full article on the Straight’s website.